Humanae Vitae: Turning point of this century

Dr. Thomas Hilgers, director of the Pope Paul VI Institute in Omaha, said his life was changed after reading Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical “Humanae Vitae” as a medical student at Creighton University.

The controversial encyclical, which reaffirmed the Catholic Church’s ban on contraception, challenged people in the medical and scientific professions to become directly involved by developing a natural way to regulate births in line with Catholic teaching.

Hilgers took that call to heart and was inspired to create the Creighton Model FertilityCare System, a natural means to regulate fertility, and NaProTECHNOLOGY, a system of using a women’s fertility and menstrual cycles to discover and treat a variety of women’s health problems. Hilgers’ system does this in a natural way that respects the dignity of the woman and promotes life.

Not every one was as quick to embrace the message presented by Pope Paul VI as Hilgers. In fact, the document was rejected by many and brought about a pivotal movement in the history of the Catholic Church, said Cardinal James Francis Stafford, president of the Pontifical Council for the Laity in Vatican City.

He calls “Humanae Vitae” the turning point of the 21st century.

“On July 25, 1968, the world knew a dramatic moment, a moment of Christian witness,” the cardinal said as he spoke at the American Academy of FertilityCare Professionals conference in Omaha July 23 – two days before the 36th anniversary of the encyclical’s publication.
On that date, Pope Paul VI released his encyclical that reaffirmed the Catholic Church’s teaching against artificial birth control and brought about a new understanding of marriage and the meaning of the sexual act, he said.

Revolutionary time

At the time of its release, Western culture was immersed in a revolutionary period. The sexual revolution was in full swing, there were protests against the war in Vietnam, and authority was being questioned on all fronts.

“And here we had an authority making a judgment about the most intimate affairs of what it means to be man and woman,” Cardinal Stafford said.

“The absolutely necessary connection between love and the fruit of love and the openness of that fruit as a gift of God” had been broken by artificial contraception and by the Lambeth Conference, Cardinal Stafford said, noting that the conference in 1931 was where the Anglican Church accepted contraception in marriage.

Later, in the 1950s and 1960s, as the birth control pill became readily available, some Catholic theologians began to question the church’s stance on contraception.

This questioning caused Pope John XXIII, in 1963, to appoint a commission on reproductive rights within the Catholic Church. A majority of the members of the commission, consisting of scientists, married couples, bishops and priests, suggested a change in the church’s teaching on birth control.

In 1968, rejecting the commission’s suggestion for change, Pope Paul VI released “Humanae Vitae.”

This caused great dissent in the church, the cardinal said. Bishops and priests, who once had been unified with the pope, now banned together to show their disapproval.

Cardinal Stafford encountered that firsthand. Then serving as a priest for the Archdiocese of Baltimore, Md., he went to a meeting of priests at which he thought they would read the encyclical. Instead, he discovered they were there to sign a letter of dissent.

Cardinal Stafford was the only one of the 70 priests gathered who did not sign the letter.
“It wasn’t a very easy witness to give that evening,” he told The Catholic Voice.

After that night, the cardinal said, there came a profound division among the group of priests, which spawned a deeper distrust among them and an unwillingness to share on pastoral issues.

“We were really unable to find a deeper sense of what it meant to find a home within the presbyterate,” he said.

A new understanding

Radical at the time of its release, “Humanae Vitae” and its teachings regarding marriage and sexuality continue to be a source of struggle for some Catholics even today. Western culture and its selfish mindset don’t make it easy, Cardinal Stafford said.

“We have manipulated our bodies, which are not appendages, to who we are as persons, but as a matter of fact are intricately united to who we are as embodied beings,” he said. “And so we are using our mind as a way to manipulate, to make an instrument of pleasure through the use of technology.”

In order to change that mindset, men and women must embrace what it means to be “fully man” and “fully woman,” he said. Pope Paul VI asked people to think about married love in a deeper way and to meditate on it, which is something Cardinal Stafford said still needs to happen today.

Clergy must help Catholics to understand that deeper meaning, he said.

“For ‘Humanae Vitae’ to be a turning point, it is absolutely essential for it to be a pastoral priority within every diocese in the United States,” he said. “Every bishop, every priest, every pastoral leader in the church must give top priority to the nuptial significance of the dignity with which a man should hold femininity and the dignity with which a woman should hold a man in his masculinity.”

These teachings should be the center of the church’s new evangelization, Cardinal Stafford said.

“The test and the measure of the church’s task of today’s evangelization are the willingness of people to accept as an integral part of their Christian discipleship the teachings of ‘Humanae Vitae,’” he said.

The fear and anxiety that existed among many of his friends in the 1970s and 1980s has been diminished, the cardinal said, and it’s because of the “greater understanding that we have of the beauty of human sexuality and of its complexity, as well as our ability really to live … what it means to be man and woman within marriage – to be man and woman as a communion in marriage.”